Posts Tagged: know thyself

First…from the Gnostic text, though some say it really closer to being a straight up gospel…The Gospel According to Thomas: “…These are the secret words which the Living Jesus spoke and Didymos Judas Thomas wrote: And He said: Whoever finds the explanation of these words will not taste death. Jesus said; Let him who seeks, not cease seeking until he finds, and when he finds/he will be troubled, and when he has been troubled, he will marvel, and he will reign over the All. ..Jesus said: If those who lead you say to you: ‘See, the Kingdom is in Heaven’, then the birds of the Heavens will precede you. If they say to you: ‘It is in the sea’, then the fish will precede you. But the Kingdom is within you and it is without you. If you will know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will know that you are the sons of the Living Father. But if you do not know yourselves then you are in poverty and you are poverty.”

This “knowing yourself” is not so easy. There is a story (there are several extant versions) of a Zen monk who went to his Master and said, “Master I want to be like you, and soon. How will this be accomplished?”

And the Master said, “It can be accomplished like this: go for just seven days watching everything you do and everything you feel, and do not let your attention lapse at all for those seven days.”

The Monk said: “Piece of cake!” He went and tried to do this, and after just a few minutes found he was thinking, instead, of dinner. And afterward, was drawn into free association and ceased to be vigilantly aware within himself. He tried again and again but could not be completely vigilant for more than a few minutes at a time. And he had been asked to be vigilant continually for seven days! So he returned to his Master and said, “It is too difficult to learn to do this in seven days—can you give me more time?”

We keep secrets from ourselves; we hide them in the back of our minds. That’s where we rationalize wrongdoing. Some of our thinking happens well underneath of our usual, narrow focus of awareness. It isn’t exactly “the subconscious”. That’s deeper… We rationalize, make excuses for what what we do out in the world, in these secret places of the mind. Rarely do we think the words in the forefront of our minds: “I can be selfish here because…”. We don’t think it out in any conscious way. We don’t hear those words in our minds–unless someone challenges us. Then perhaps we have to dig for it, and we might spew it out aloud. “Because…because of what they said that time…” We don’t usually rationalize our selfishness consciously, but the rationalization goes on, worked out in a gibbering inner dialectic, an inner dialogue somewhere in the murkiest associative-linkage of our minds.

Selfishness, greed, malice, predation, neglect of children or neglect of parents…we do “think” the rationalization through without realizing we’ve thought it through. But our “thinking” is carried out in the bent definitions making up our own little fallacies. “I deserve this despite what my conscience is trying to tell me because he said…” …”I haven’t gotten what I wanted so many times, I may as well just…” And it goes on and on, a mumbling rationalizer hidden inside us, endlessly muttering, hunched back there in the shadows.

We don’t know we’re doing it. But we do. It can be seen–the whole mechanism of the mind can be seen. If we follow the associations, the linkage of mechanical self-justifying thinking back, link by link, , and keep looking, the linkage enters dark rooms suddenly lit by the painful bravery of honest seeing, and we’re surprised at what we find there. “So THAT is why I did it?” It takes time to learn, to effect. Persistence.

… In Eastern meditation it’s sometimes called “seeing your mind”. Normally it seems as impossible as seeing one’s own face without a mirror. But we can see the hidden parts of our own minds. There are ways. Some call it self-observation. The method is ancient, is found in esoteric schools of many traditions. It can be learned through deep cognitive therapy, too, I suspect. It’s what Socrates spoke of in Phaedrus…